Fair Rosamund by Arthur Hughes

[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Victorian Painters —> Arthur Hughes —> Hughes's Painting]

The Lady with the Lilacs

Arthur Hughes

1863

Oil on pnel

Overall: 44.5 x 22.6 cm (17 1/2 x 8 7/8 in.

Collection: Art Gallery of Toronto

Object no. 65/29

Presented in memory of Frances Baines, Membership Secretary (1951-1964), by members of Council, the Women's Committee and staff of the Art Gallery of Toronto, 1966 [Click on the image to enlarge it].

See below for a note by Ray Dyer on the connection of this painting with the author Lewis Carroll. Mouse over the text for links.]

Image identified by the gallery as being in the public domain. Downloaded from the gallery's website by Jacqueline Banerjee.

The painting was once owned by Lewis Carroll and may even have been painted for him: "Mr A. Hughes came over to be photographed with his children, and brought the picture I bought off him some time ago" (Diaries 4: 256; see also 230 and n.254). The Oxford don had become a friend of the Hughes family, and there is a marked resemblance between the young woman in this portrait and a sketch of Alice drawn in Carroll's manuscript for the early version of "Alice's Adventures." The two girls - by Hughes and by Carroll - are clearly "related" - if only artistically - and the exaggerated neck pose is telling. Would the talented Hughes really have intended such an unnatural representation? If the sequence of pictures was actually (1) Carroll's and (2) Hughes, then the pose of The Lady with the Lilacs could well have been inspired by Carroll's sketch, in which Alice's sharply tilted head might express the author's deep regret that his relationship with the adored Liddell sisters was fracturing. Since the precise chronology of the two representations is unfortunately not available to us, this is entirely speculative. — Ray Dyer

Bibliography

Carroll, Lewis. Lewis Carroll's Diaries. The Private Journals of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Ed. Edward Wakeling. England: Lewis Carroll Society, 1993-2007. Vol. 4.

The Lady with the Lilacs. Art Gallery of Ontario. Web. 25 April 2023.

Created 21 December 2021